NOISE-CON 2010 in conjunction ith the 159th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America

Date Published

04/2010

Conference Location

Baltimore, MD

Abstract

Active electroacoustic systems are commonly employed to transmit sound from one
location to another. For example, consider the following configuration: a person talks into
a microphone, which produces an electrically amplified signal for driving a loudspeaker,
and the loudspeaker induces an output acoustic signal allowing someone else at a more
distant location to hear the person talking. Unfortunately, such system designs typically do
not consider acoustic feedback, which can destabilize the system and result in “howling.”
In contrast, a feedback control system can transmit sound from one location to another
without the risk of howling using sound portholes, which are collocated
microphone/loudspeaker transducers. We design feedback controllers to transmit sound
between sound portholes. These controllers model physical analog systems, such as a
spring or a gyrator. The spring controller essentially binds the diaphragms of the two
sound portholes together. We relate the spring controller to the string connecting two tin
cans in the classical tin can telephone. Measurements are performed on a real feedback
control system with two sound portholes. Because the feedback controller models a passive
system, it is theoretically stable in any (dissipative) acoustic environment.